[TUHS] A/UX [was Linux is on-topic]

[Arno Griffioen]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 02:47:08AM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> ISTR that A/UX was nothing special as a Unix.  Am I failing to remember?

No, that's absolutely true.

It was a fairly plain-jane SVR2.2 with some back-ported bits from SVR3 (and 
perhaps some SVR4?), mostly for networking and filesystem work.

However, it's an interesting setup in the fact how it ran the a normal MacOS
instance basically 'virtualised' next to it and allowed some limited 
interaction between the two.

Also the Mac IIfx was basically desgined and built for AU/X and had on-board 
hardware that was way over-specced for plain MacOS. The hardware really
was more UNIX workstation than Mac.

Eg. it had full DMA support on most I/O and such.. Unheard of on simpler 
macs and not even used by MacOS of the day which simply ignored that
an ran everything in PIO mode happily.

Mid 90's I did a number of UUCP and (Send)Mail, Usenet, etc. setups on 
these and by some creative interaction with the MacOS side and clients
it allowed the 'Mac ecosystem' LAN and software of the day to send and receive
'internet' mail and such. (leased lines in Europe were very, very expensive
and slow until the late 90's and early 00's so UUCP and dailup was quite
common for a long time for small businesses..)

It was a time that Apple engineers were really making some strides to
kickstart a change to a *IX based multitasking MacOS, but it all fizzled
out as A/UX was never succesful and Apple at the time was not in the 
best of spots finance-wise.

As such, it's an 'interesting oddball' in UNIX history IMHO, but not from
a viewpoint of having brought anything new or revolutionary to the table 
that has stuck around.

							Bye, Arno.